THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF COUNTY HISTORY
Susan G. Pearl

For thousands of years before the
first Europeans arrived, the land
known today as Prince George's
County was occupied by native
Americans. Considerable
evidence of their settlements can
be found along both the Patuxent and the
Potomac rivers; hundreds of prehistoric sites
indicate the presence of many villages and
temporary camps in the centuries before the
arrival of European colonists. Contact between
the native inhabitants and Europeans came in
1634, after the first Maryland colonists landed
near the mouth of the Potomac River.
Governor Leonard Calvert sailed up the
Potomac to trade with members of the Piscataway
tribe before establishing St. Mary's City,
Maryland's first settlement.

The Maryland colony flourished at St. Mary's
City and enjoyed peaceful relations with the
neighboring tribes. The population increased,
new counties were created, and within thirty
years farms and plantations lined the Patuxent
and the Potomac well into what is now Prince
George's County. In the mid-seventeenth
century all of this land was included in Calvert
and Charles counties, established in 1654 and
1658, respectively; the land along the Patuxent
was part of Calvert
County, while that along
the Potomac was part of Charles
County.

By 1695 about seventeen hundred people
lived in the area. The following year, on
St. George's Day, April 23, 1696, a new county
was established, named for Prince George of
Denmark, the husband of Princess Anne of
England. The new Prince
George's County
extended from the Charles County line on the
south all the way to the Pennsylvania border,
marking Maryland's western frontier. It
remained the frontier county until 1748, when
the northern boundary became basically the
line it is today.

Four years before Prince George's County
was founded, the Church of England became
the established church of the Maryland colony.
When Prince George's County came into being
in 1696, two parishes had already been created
within its boundaries; St. Paul's in the area that
had been part of Calvert County, and Piscataway
(or King George's) in the area that was
once part of Charles. At this time, there was
already a church at Charles Town, the busy
port on the Patuxent that was to be Prince
George's first county seat. St. Paul's Parish had
a rural chapel about twelve miles south of
Charles Town, while in Piscataway Parish a
church was built in 1696, at the site of present-
day St. John's Church on Broad Creek.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The land of Prince George's County was gradually
settled during the 1700s. From all parts of
the British Isles as well as the countries of
Europe, men and women came -- some free,
others indentured servants. By the beginning of
the eighteenth century, landowners had turned
to slave labor for the operation of their tobacco
plantations, and large numbers of Africans
were brought to Maryland to work at the cultivation of that
labor-intensive crop.

In 1706 the colonial General Assembly established
five new port towns: Queen Anne, Nottingham and Mill Town on the Patuxent,
Marlborough on the Western Branch of the Patuxent, and Aire at Broad Creek
on the Potomac.
A year later, Piscataway was established at the
head of Piscataway Creek.

Marlborough developed more rapidly than
the other port towns, and by 1718 it had
become such an active center that its inhabitants
petitioned to have the court proceedings
moved there from Charles Town; the county
court met for the first time in Upper Marlborough in 1721.
From this time until early in the
twentieth century, Upper Marlboro (as it is
now written) was the commercial, political,
and social center of Prince George's County,
and it has remained the county seat to this day.
Charles Town, on the other hand, has ceased to
exist: only the late eighteenth-century plantation-
house known as Mount Calvert stands on
the site of this early port town.

In 1742 Bladensburg was established on the
Eastern Branch of the Potomac. Commissioners
were appointed to purchase sixty acres and
lay out a town of sixty one-acre lots, most of
which were sold right away. Each of the new
owners were required to construct a 400-square-
foot house, with a brick or stone chimney,
within eighteen months of purchase. Bostwick,
the Market Master's House, and the Hilleary-
Magruder House are good examples of the
earliest dwellings built in this important port
town. Together with Upper Marlborough, Nottingham,
Aire at Broad Creek, Queen Anne
and Piscataway, Bladensburg became an official
tobacco inspection station in 1747.

Although some industry was established,
agriculture was the basis of the county's
economy and directly or indirectly provided
the livelihood for every resident. The heart of
this agricultural economy was tobacco. It
created the wealth that built fine plantation
houses such as Compton Bassett near Upper
Marlboro and His Lordship's Kindness near
Rosaryville, educated the children of the
leading families, and supported the work of the
churches. It also provided the means to enjoy
leisure time in activities such as fox hunting and
horse racing and enabled planters to devote
such care to their horses and their breeding that
Prince George's County became the cradle of
American thoroughbred racing. Tobacco
created a sophisticated society that traded its
staple for goods from all over the world.

Chief among the county's notable industries
in the eighteenth century was the Snowden
Iron Works, which provided wealth to the
Snowden family and made possible the building
of Montpelier, one of the county's grandest
mansions. Water-powered mills also were
built on the various tributaries of the
Patuxent and Potomac rivers.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

Although the land of Prince George's County
was spared the experience of actual battle, its
residents were deeply involved in the great
tide of events during the Revolution. Prince
Georgians organized county committees and
sent many of their sons to fight for the cause of
independence. John Rogers of Upper Marlborough
sat in the Continental Congress, which in
July 1776 voted to make the colonies free and
independent states. In September 1787 Daniel
Carroll, also of Upper Marlborough, was one
of the thirty-nine men who signed the newly
framed Constitution of the United States.
Four distinguished Prince Georgians attended
the Ratification Convention in Annapolis
in April 1788 and voted unanimously
in favor of approving the Constitution.

In 1790, when the Congress in Philadelphia
decided to relocate the new federal capital,
Prince George's County ceded most of the land
necessary to establish the District of Columbia.
The development of the capital was aided
immeasurably by Benjamin Stoddert of
Bostwick, who as George Washington's agent
acquired much of the needed land. Stoddert
later served as the first secretary of the navy.

After the Revolution two Prince Georgians
assumed leadership roles in the newly independent
churches of Maryland. Thomas John
Claggett of Croom became the first
Episcopal
bishop consecrated in this country, and John
Carroll of Upper Marlborough became the
first Roman Catholic bishop in the United
States. Beginning in 1783 the Catholic Church
formulated its first constitution, meeting at
White Marsh, one of the oldest Catholic establishments in Maryland.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Prince George's County was not spared
military action during; the War of 1812. In
August 1814 the British sailed up the Patuxent
to Benedict and marched through the county,
camping at Nottingham and Upper Marlborough,
and continuing past the brand-new
Addison Chapel and north along the Eastern
Branch of the Potomac (the Anacostia River).
At Bladensburg they defeated poorly prepared
American troops and continued into Washington
to burn the capital city. On their way back
through Upper Marlborough, they seized Dr.
William Beanes and took him with them to Baltimore.
Francis Scott Key was on a mission to
plead for Dr. Beanes's release when he witnessed
the bombardment of Fort McHenry and
wrote the poem that became the national
anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner."

Changes came to the county in the early
years of the nineteenth century. Although
tobacco remained predominant, farmers
throughout Prince George's County began to
experiment with new crops on land worn out
by continuous cultivation of tobacco. The
efforts of Charles B. Calvert of Riversdale
brought about the establishment in 1856 of the
nation's first agricultural research college, now
the University of Maryland at College
Park.
Industries also were established here, employing machines, mass
production, and hundreds
of workers. In the early 1800s the first turnpike
was constructed, linking Washington and Baltimore;
about fourteen miles of convenient,
nearly straight roadway ran through Prince
George's County In the 1820s the Snowden
family established textile mills on the Patuxent
River at a place soon to be known as Laurel.
In 1835 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line was
completed between Baltimore and Washington
bringing momentous change to the area,
altering traditional methods of travel, transforming
small crossroads Communities into
population centers and, eventually, sites for
suburban expansion. The railroad provided the
right-of-way on which Samuel F. B. Morse
strung the nation's first telegraph line in 1844.

Several Prince Georgians achieved distinction
in nineteenth-century politics. Gabriel
Duvall of Marietta sat for many years
as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme
Court, and five other residents were elected
governor of Maryland: Robert
Bowie of Nottingham, Samuel
Sprigg of Northampton, Joseph Kent of
Rose Mount, Thomas G. Pratt of Upper Marlborough,
and Oden Bowie
of Fairview.

As the nineteenth century passed its
midpoint, Prince George's County was prosperous,
its society and economy solidly based
on agricultural pursuits. But the old tobacco
society was soon to end, as the nation plunged
into the bitter Civil War. Prince George's
County, like the state and the nation, was
divided during that monumental struggle from
1861 to 1865. Although Maryland did not
secede from the Union, there was great
sympathy in the county for the southern cause.
The county had a plantation economy and a
population in 1860 that was more than half
slave. The prominent families were slave
holders and southern-oriented, and many of
their sons went south to fight for the Confederacy. When the
institution of slavery was
abolished in the District of Columbia in 1862,
many of the slaves in Prince George's County
fled to freedom there. Emancipation took
effect in Maryland in January 1865, bringing to
an end the old plantation system. When the
Civil War ended three months later, the old
Prince George's society was gone, and the
County began the difficult process of creating a
second life.

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

The Civil War brought significant changes to
Prince George's County; some were immediately
noticeable, such as the freeing of the
slaves. Small communities of blacks began to
develop soon after the cessation of hostilities,
such as Rossville near the Muirkirk Furnace
and the black communities near Queen Anne
and Upper Marlborough. Each of these communities
were centered around a place of
worship, usually Methodist, and in Rossville
the residents established a benevolent society
hall to provide aid to newly freed blacks. The
newly emancipated citizens proceeded to build
their homes, while supporting themselves
working in the iron furnaces or railroad construction,
but principally in farming. With the
assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau, these
communities soon had schoolhouses and
teachers, beginning the significant movement
toward black education.

Changes also occurred in the county's
economy.. Agriculture remained the predominant way
of life. Tobacco continued to be the
most important crop, and the large plantations
by no means vanished. But in the last decades
of the nineteenth century, small farms producing
a variety of crops placed a larger role in the
county's economic life. Between the end of the
Civil War and the turn of the century, the
number of farms in Prince George's County
doubled; while the average farm size decreased
dramatically. Local commerce and the growth
of towns such as Hyattsville placed a part in the
overall economic picture. Hyattsville had its
beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century,
when C.C. Hyatt established his store and post
office at the intersection of the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad and the turnpike. In the 1870s
Hyatt platted a residential subdivision; the
community prospered and grew, becoming an
attractive and desirable place to live. Within a
decade, it was a thriving commercial center.

The county also was affected by the expanding
federal government in the neighboring
capital. As Washington grew from a small
to a major city, it began to spill over into the
adjoining counties. A new phenomenon - the
residential suburb developed to accommodate the
increasing number of federal employees and city workers. A new branch
line of the
Baltimore and Potomac Railroad had opened in
l872, joining with the main line to southern
Maryland at the Bowie junction and creating a
second rail link between Washington and Baltimore.
In the 1880s and 1890s more and more
residential communities were developed along
with both of the railroad lines, offering federal
employees the opportunity to live away from
the city in the healthful surroundings easily accessible
by rail. In towns such as Hyattsville,
Takoma Park, Riverdale,
Charlton Heights
(now Berwyn Heights), and College Park, fine
Victorian dwellings of the 1880s and 1890s still
give evidence of this booming period of
suburban expansion. As the nineteenth century
drew to a close, the county's population was
30,000, thirty percent higher than it had been
in 1860.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As the new century began, new types of transportation
spurred additional residential development along the borders of the
federal City.
Brentwood and Mount Rainier, for example,
grew up along the new streetcar line, which
offered an easy commute between home and
work. Several black communities (for example,
North Brentwood and Fairmount Heights) were
established, attracting members of an increasing
group of black professionals from Washington.
And although farming remained the way of life
for man in the rural areas, the denser suburban
population close to Washington continued to
grow, spurred by the increasing use of the automobile;
Cheverly, Greenbelt, District Heights,
and Glenarden are examples of this trend.
Prince George's had been a county of 30,000 in
1900; by 1930 its population had doubled, and
by 1950 it had increased to almost 200,000.
Population growth has continued, registering
some 730,000 today. The 1990s promise
a new and active image for Prince George's
County: the development of professional
educational establishments, the revitalization
of older communities, and the preservation of the county's proud
heritage of historic resources and rural areas.